#27. Reaching Level X in October 2020

TLDR: First integrations (GitHub, GitLab, Intercom) are released 🐚. Product companies niche validation is in progress 🥑. Hope to have Fibery 2.0 launch in December 🥶. Feedback is accumulated and processed 🧳.

Flashback: #26. Probing Product Workspace in September 2020.

Main numbers ( → sign shows the changes between July, August, September & October):

Fibery. Connected workspace for teams.

Leads/month: 750 → 700 → 650 → 700 Active Accounts: 140 → 155 → 165 → 180 Team size: 14 → 19 → 20 → 21 Burn rate: $60K → $85K → $95K → 100K/month
MRR: $3.1K → $3.6K → $4K → $5.3K/month

Overview

October was weird. We had several interviews with Head of Marketing position candidates. Some were promising, but we decided to wait till November 5th to make an offer. Hope this position will be closed soon and we will revitalize our marketing activities. First integration packs were released (Intercom, GitHub, GitLab, and Trello). We use Intercom integration ourselves and extremely happy. Finally, we can quickly capture customers’ feedback and link it to existing ideas, features, or create bugs and new ideas.

Fibery 2.0 did not happen. Technically two things are blocking us: a new pricing model and automatic product workspace setup. There are good chances that we’ll do the release in December, but in 2020 you never know 😬.

Fibery adoption and metrics are slowly improving, but without new launches and with zero marketing effort there are no stark changes.

North Star metric got better as well:

Fibery Feedback aggregation

We aggregate all feedback from Intercom chats and created a nice report (right in Fibery) that shows the most important product areas and the most requested features (click Drill Down and List tabs on a report to see details):

Let’s dig into the top 10 requests:

Five of them are started (one is completed), so let’s talk about the rest. We are going to focus on them after Fibery 2.0 release:

• Entity-level permissions. In scope for the next 4-6 months.
• Entity history or activity log. In scope for the next 2-3 months.
• Free read-only users. In scope for the next 2-3 months.
• Archive entities. No plans to implement in near future.
• Hierarchical Lists. In scope for the next 1-2 months.

Direct Sales Experiment + Gabe Neil

Remember, last month we unexpectedly decided to look for new niches and try a direct sales approach. In October there were many preparations, but no real results.

We’ve hired our first SDR, Gabe Neil 🍀. He is from Scotland and did not have any experience in this area. But we were looking for great writers first, and Gabe is very good here.

We’ve also set up outreach CRM in Fibery to plan and track this process. It was not the basic app, but it works well to track all niches, scripts, touches, and sweeps. We are going to include this app as a template for Outreach Sales process.

Integration Pack: Intercom, GitHub, GitLab, and Trello

In October we released first integrations with Intercom, GitHub, GitLab, and Trello (Jira is in progress). Fibery has an unfair advantage, it has a flexible data model 😜. It means Fibery can replicate the data model of any external tool. For example, it can fetch Companies, Contacts, Conversations, and Tags from Intercom and connect them together. Or it can fetch Projects, Branches, and Merge Requests from GitLab and connect them.

Here is one example. We use Intercom ourselves. In Fibery you can aggregate all Conversations, Companies and Contacts from Intercom. Then you can review Conversations and make them actionable: create tasks, link text to ideas, etc. Here is the setup flow:

And here is the fun part where we link request to existing idea:

Read more information about Fibery integrations.

Product Updates

DONE

Smart Folders

Smart Folders is a way to improve the Left menu structure in Fibery. You can show a filtered and sorted list of entities in the Left menu and create Views inside entities. Here is one quick example where we want to see only active Features and a list of Bugs for every feature:

Create Documents and Whiteboards inside entities

Sometimes you want to attach several documents or whiteboards to an entity. For example, you have a feature and it would be handy to create technical specification in a document and draw flow diagram. Now you can do it, just install Documents and Whiteboards extensions. Here is how:

Automatically link entities based on rules

Now you can set up automatic relations based on some rules. It is mostly needed for integrations, but I think you will invent other interesting cases. Below we automatically link Pull Requests from GitHub to User Stories in Fibery.

New Search for # (insert entity) operation

When you insert an entity into a document or rich edit field, you will enjoy the new search with filters:

IN PROGRESS

Set formula for the Name field

Soon it will be possible to set a formula for the Name field. This is helpful for many cases like you don’t want to name all conversations, but just use participants and date automatically.

Jira Integration

Some teams are not ready to give up Jira and enjoy Fibery. Integration will alleviate this pain and will help Fibery to help Product Teams, while software engineering teams can stay in Jira.

Better Permissions

No comments (#*&^).

Share the whole Workspace

Soon it will be possible to share the whole workspace, it will include all Apps and relations between them. As a result, we will have the possibility to quickly set up new domains (like for Startups, for BioTech companies, etc), and you will have the possibility to create some workspace and share it with your customers. Imagine you are a consultant with a unique marketing management process. You can set up it in Fibery and offer it to your customers as a ready-to-go solution. Win-win 😊.

Documents and entity sharing

The long-awaiting feature is in progress. In the first release, it will be possible to share any Document and Entity (Feature, Bug, etc). The internal version will be ready next week, but most likely we will release it for all only in December.

Faster search

We are moving our current search to Elastic. It will be much faster and finally will handle “No Access” permissions well (this is the last thing to consider “No Access” permissions done).

🏩 Random

Random photo of our team

Pasha is facing Smart Folders:

Random image from our Slack channel:

Hard to comment this:

Random link from our Slack channel:

How I built this: Calendly: Tope Awotona

Random quote:

In well-designed software, the instructions to the user tell a clear story of the world the programmer is trying to achieve, though the best ones tend to maintain some ambiguity. They tell a user to communicate publicly in 140 characters or to edit an encyclopedia entry, but they don’t specify which characters or which entry. The magic happens when a well-told story meets an imaginative set of users.

🧂 Reddit discussion